Monthly Archives: March 2015

I want to learn the star-stories again. This weekend Orion hung over us as we drove back through the pass. A warm spring with hint of summer in her teeth, dirty snow at the road edge, a garden of ink. I want more mythology and scraped skin and calluses. I want to become a monster.

I tell stories in a scattered way. If it’s a story I know, I throw in names and places without reference points, I assume the audience knows the path and I barge forward. If it’s a story I’ve been told, I forget names almost as a matter of course. Is it Perseus or Theseus? It was Andromeda chained, not Ariadne, right? Ariadne was the princess with the Minotaur, the woman who gave the spool to unravelling, the lover of Icarus, right? Or Theseus? The names jumble and I remember bright slashes instead of the whole tapestry.

I am at a job right now where I feel I’ve become dumber. I push papers and I make sure contracts are signed and I don’t know that I’ve learned anything that’s really that noteworthy. On Monday I’m changing to a new place, and I hope I get to dig in to technology again, to learn how things piece together. Is it strange to want to learn programming languages because I feel like it helps me write? I don’t really want to program anything. I don’t really care about databases. But I like the syntax, I like the logic.

This weekend, hiding away from the strong climbers, I chatted with another new boulderer about poetry. “It just doesn’t feel active enough” I heard myself say as I tried to figure out the first move on a V0, and it felt like I was reading a script. Why aren’t I writing? I say that it feels to dull on the page, that it’s not motion and I want motion. And yet, when given the chance, I spent most of the day standing still, watching other people move. He was excited to find out more about the poetry scene in Seattle, but I feel like what I told him was all old news, the world as it existed three years ago. So much has changed. And I say it’s because I’m climbing, but here I am, working on something a child just tried. I’m no climber. (And my ego rears her head, and she stomps me down into small pieces, and I am nothing, this is a farce, girl what are you doing here you foolish not-even-woman.)

And yet. And yet, when I read in January, I looked out and saw the friends I’m used to seeing in the gym. And I stood and I shook and I stumbled and I loved it. How is that not active? It was more exposing than a heel hook with torn pants would have been. And stop yelling at yourself. Breathe. Put your hand on the rock and just fall when you have to fall – no one is judging.

It’s so frightening for me to give voice to want. To say, out loud- This. World, I want This Thing. But I feel a yawning opening toothy want inside me, and it’s crawling out of my throat whether I feel ok with it or not. Want. I want. I want to become a monster. A star woman. (I am shrouding this all in metaphor, I know. I am still evading. I am still refusing to claim anything as mine.) The problem with wanting is that you risk undoing. You risk losing. A goal is something I can fall shy of. A goal is something I can miss, I can fail.

All I thought I wanted was a book of my own. Something that I created, put in this world, in other people’s hands. That feels less important now. But I can become a monster who is not a book, and this is not failing. I am not writing a book. I am hanging up that piece of me for now, and that’s ok.